The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Friday, January 13, 2017

Is Obama Behind the Hit on Trump? How the Deep State Game is Played

It's now publicly accepted that the CIA, factions in the CIA, whatever, object to Trump and are making life difficult for him.

The interesting question is, is President Obama just a passenger on the runaway Deep State train, thoughtlessly rattling through his hollow valedictories, or is he the conductor? or the engineer?

I was struck by this possibility while reflecting on David Ignatius' revelation on Thursday that intercepts showed that Trump's security adviser, Michael Flynn, had been on the phone with the Russian ambassador several times on the day President Obama announced the expulsion of the Russian diplos.

Hmmm. I thought. With all due respect, David Ignatius doesn't do reporting. He does top-drawer steno. He didn't dig this factoid out. It was fed to him. Specifically, the fact that Flynn's communications were being intercepted--normally, one would expect, the kind of tittle-tattle kept from the public eye under the rubric of "protecting sources and methods"--was being made part of the public discourse.

The Obama administration is aware of frequent contacts between
President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn
and Russia’s ambassador to the United States, including on the day
President Barack Obama hit Moscow with sanctions in retaliation for
election-related hacking, a senior U.S. official said Friday.

...Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador were first reported by
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. The official who spoke to The
Associated Press was not authorized to confirm the contacts publicly and
insisted on anonymity.

So, the story, relying on covert surveillance, that Flynn is canoodling with the Russian ambois being determinedly and repeatedly fed to the press.

Consider: for eight years the Obama administration has been resolute/overbearing/fanatical, choose your adjective, in plugging leaks. But now we get this concerted blabberai.

Is Obama just phoning it in while his aides run riot at the end of his administration.

Or...

Is Obama condoning and perhaps even directing the hit on Trump--Obama in the library with a candlestick--while making sure his fingerprints aren't on the weapon?

Time to re-up one of my favorite pieces, on the 1954 campaign against Joe McCarthy. It's a useful corrective for young journos craving their "Murrow moment"--when the press seemingly rises up in spontaneous democratic revulsion to mete justice out on a demagogue.

But it also provides an instructive primer on how the executive branch can use the deep state, dossiers, allies in Congress and--of course!--a cooperative press to do its dirty work.

Spoiler: taking down McCarthy was the result of a carefully planned campaign executed by bureaucrats, spooks, and pols at the order of President Eisenhower and bringing in the press at the last stage to administer the coup de grace.

I wrote this piece a year ago. But as you can see, it stands up pretty well today, in the last days of the Obama administration and, possibly, the last days of Donald Trump.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Yes, the Press Might Do a Joe McCarthy on Trump; Just Not the Way You Think

I am not particularly impressed with protestations that the
Fourth Estate is going to solve our Donald Trump problem by speaking truth to
power, exposing his low, dishonest, and inflammatory rhetoric, and the filthy
bigotry in which he traffics.

There’s a lot of people—a lot of voters—down in the sewer with
Donald Trump.Apparently the smell
doesn’t bother them.

Nor
do I hold out hope that elite opinion-makers like Thomas Friedman will
lead the stampede of asses that will trample Trump into well-deserved
oblivion.

And I do not have much patience with the trope that all the
media needs to do is put on its big-boy pants and stick it to Donald Trump in
the name of decency just like the press did to Joe McCarthy in the glorious
days of Ed Murrow in 1954.

This hagiography is enshrined in George Clooney’s biopic of
Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck (excellent
film, by the way), which characterizes Murrow as having the courage to step
forth and confront McCarthy with a scathing series of televised exposes in
March 1954 when nobody else would.

Indeed, Murrow took up the cudgels in 1953 when few others
were willing.Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly openly characterized the famous See
It Now reports as pre-planned advocacy, not reporting.As quoted in Ralph Engelman’s biography, Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television
Journalism, Friendly declared:

I think we were
balancing how what we knew how to do well against what he did superbly well, which
is to be a demagogue.And I’m sorry we
had to do it that way. But it was the challenge of a lifetime, a desperate
moment for the country, and not to have used it because of a series of rules
that we would apply to ourselves and that Senator McCarthy would abuse to the
ultimate would have made history judge us very harshly. [Engelman, pg. 125]

McCarthy was a world-class creep and demagogue.He was also an eager bottom-feeder in the
murky waters of the American security state, which were lavishly chummed by J.
Edgar Hoover with real and faux
evidence to ensnare real, faux,
potential, and imagined Communists.Eventually
McCarthy got big and intimidating enough to upset a lot of people.Declaring the Democratic Party the “party of
treason” and questioning the patriotism of two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was a start.But I think just
the start.

We can take it as a given that certain media outlets were
determined to stick it to McCarthy.But
in deciding whether the media today has the mission and chops to properly identify an existential
demagogic threat to the nation and righteously sh*tcan it, it would help to
explore the assertion that CBS and prestige media were able to reach beyond its
core audience of disgruntled Democrats and liberals to bring down Tailgunner
Joe.

For
a more plausible alternative, try President Eisenhower and his anger at
McCarthy’s
attack on the Army, which started with a gaudy search for Communists in
the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

Ike apparently no like.

President Eisenhower initiated a secret campaign to nail McCarthy in
the beginning of 1954.The story was
first told in the 1980s by Eisenhower staffer William Bragg Ewald in his book Who Killed Joe McCarthy?It will be told in greater detail in 2016 by David
Nichols of Southwestern College, Kansas, in an as yet untitled book based on
the Eisenhower archives and other declassified sources.

Here’s what Nichols had to say in an excerpt posted by the National Archives:

Eisenhower
carried off his anti-McCarthy operation by means of rigorous delegation toa
handful of trusted subordinates; these included Chief of Staff Sherman Adams;
VicePresident
Richard Nixon; Press Secretary James Hagerty; Attorney General Herbert Brownell,
Jr., and his deputy, William Rogers; Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the
administration’srepresentative
to the United Nations; and Assistant Secretary of Defense Fred A. Seaton,who
collaborated with H. Struve Hensel, the Pentagon’s general counsel. While less intimate
with the President, Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and Army counsel JohnG.
Adams played critical roles. These men were expected, like foot soldiers in
war, to puttheir
lives and reputations on the line to protect the President and extinguish the
politicalinfluence
of Joe McCarthy.

Yup, even that devoted anti-Communist Richard Nixon saw
which way the wind was blowing and signed on to ratf*ck McCarthy.And it looks like J. Edgar Hoover helped cut
off McCarthy at the knees by repudiating a document McCarthy brandished during
the Army hearings.

In January 1954 Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Sherman Adams instructed
the Army’s Chief Counsel to write up a report describing the harassment of the
Army instigated by McCarthy’s pit bull, Roy Cohn, in the matter of fellow
staffer David Schine, with whom Cohn appears to have been infatuated.By February, the job of preparing the report
is in the hands of the Assistant Secretary of Defense
and the General Counsel of the Army.

And then in early March, per Nichols…

Sherman Adams’s good friend, Vermont’s
Republican Senator Ralph W. Flanders, ridiculed McCarthy in a speech on the
Senate floor. Flanders words dripped with sarcasm: “He dons his war paint. He
goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops…”

Murrow quoted Flanders’ speech in
his famous See It Now broadcast the same night
.

Murrow’s legendary program makes for
interesting viewing.

It was immediately recognized as a
high-minded hit piece designed to show McCarthy at his least attractive.One of the more ham-fisted segments shows an
apparently juiced Tailgunner Joe, his comb-over sagging into a bedraggled
spitcurl on his forehead, engaged in some dinner-speech blather.As McCarthy struggles to keep his wits about
him and finish his speech, the camera portentously pans to a rather naff mural
behind him depicting George Washington in a heroic pose.Compare and contrast, the message here.

I was struck by a clip he showed of
Eisenhower energetically asserting his prerogative to handle executive branch
loyalty issues without congressional committees (i.e. McCarthy) butting
in.Incongruously, the famously placid
Eisenhower in his physical appearance and temperament strikingly resembled that
famous shoe-banger Nikita Khrushchev.

The worst thing Murrow comes up with
is catching McCarthy lying (or as we’d say today, “perhaps intentionally
misrepresenting”) the ACLU as a proscribed Communist organization while he
bullyrags a State Department boffin for a book he wrote in the 1930s.

Those
events set the stage for March 11, 1954. That day, on Eisenhower’s secret
orders,Seaton
released a 34-page, carefully edited account of the privileges sought for DavidSchine
to key senators, representatives, and the press. The document ignited such a
fire-storm
of negative publicity that, on March 16, the McCarthy subcommittee agreed tohold
televised hearings. McCarthy would temporarily step down as chair…

The hearings were broadcast by the
fledgling ABC and DuMont networks with gavel-to-gavel coverage for 36 eye-glazing days.It will be very interesting if Nichols’ book
addresses the hows and whys of the collapse of McCarthy’s poll standing (from
the 50s to the 30s) during the hearings for the understanding of modern
onlookers.

Here is a clip of the apparently cathartic “have you no decency?” slam from Judge Welch to the
applause of the gallery.The indecency in question was McCarthy hounding Welch over the issue of a
member of his team that Welch had to send packing back to Boston because he had
belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization HUAC deemed a Communist
front.After the decency jab, Welch still had
to deploy a hissy fit and end his examination in order to deflect McCarthy’s determined efforts to make hay out of the
embarrassing incident, so it’s difficult for me to grasp how this was a decisive
high-five moment for the anti-McCarthy team.But apparently so.

Much more effective in my opinion
are the cutaways to the mesmerizingly sinister apparition of Roy Cohn,
who looks and writhes like a hagfish impatient to swim off and burrow into a welcoming
corpse.

On December 2, 1954, McCarthy was condemned
by the Senate by a vote of 67 to 22.This
is usually reported as “censure” but it wasn’t, as the contemporary account in
the New York Times made clear.Richard Nixon presided over the
session and finessed the adoption of the resolution.It took a lot of finessing and some low
comedy to deliver a satisfactory outcome in the evenly-split (44 Rs, 44 Ds, 1 Independent) Senate.

The only transgression cited in the
resolution was McCarthy acting like an insulting, high-handed jerk toward a
number of senators who were investigating him.Apparently the investigation itself hadn’t produced anything deemed
suitably awesome—or maybe it was always intended as just a waystation in the
road to Senate condemnation.In any
case, the anti-McCarthy forces simply nailed him for his demeanor.

People who remember Clarence Thomas’
“high tech lynching” stunt before the Senate Judiciary Committee will be amused
to learn that one of McCarthy’s main transgressions was characterizing the
proceeding against him as “a lynch-party” or “lynch bee.”

All 44 Democrats voted for the resolution. Twenty-two Republicans also voted in
favor and twenty-two against, leading one to believe that Eisenhower-inflected
party politics rather than good old small d/Large D/Murrow-fueled democratic
indignation was in play.Senator
Flanders, the good buddy of Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff Sherman Adams,
introduced the resolution.

Afterwards, McCarthy faded away and
died from hepatitis.Again, it will be
interesting to see what Nichols has to say about any Eisenhower-related
maneuverings that may have prevented McCarthy from bouncing back.

Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly,
became very close to Eisenhower, describing Ike after he left office as “a
part-time correspondent for CBS News” because of all the TV specials the
ex-President did with CBS Reports.I leave it to the inquisitive to explore when
those close relations began, and whether the well-connected Murrow et. al. had any inkling that Eisenhower
and his team were maneuvering to drop the hammer on McCarthy as the famous See It Now broadcast was assembled.

One of my favorite journo stories concerns the carefully choreographed leaking of the vital Army report to the press on
March 11, two days after Murrow’s famous broadcast. Press coverage of the allegations created the outrage
boomlet that midwived the fatal Army hearings.The anecdote comes courtesy of Art Spivak, then working for
International News Service:

... the Army’s counsel, John G. Adams slipped
to some senators and to the Baltimore Sun’s reporter Phil Potter a 34-page
single-spaced “chronology” of efforts by Cohn, with McCarthy’s backing, to
force the Army to give Roy’s recently-drafted buddy G. David Schine a direct
promotion to lieutenant, assign him to serve his military term on the staff of
the subcommittee, and enjoy sundry other favors. The bottom line was a charge
that Cohn threatened to “wreck the Army” if his wishes were rejected.

Adams, a fellow South Dakotan and long-time
friend of Potter’s, knew Potter would make use of the anti-Cohn, anti-McCarthy
chronology, Potter, in turn, knew that the chronology was potential dynamite
and his unsyndicated story would get nowhere unless other news outlets had it
too.

The way Potter told it to me later, he
therefore offered a copy of the Adams chronology to Arkansas Democratic Sen.
John L. McClellan, ranking minority member of McCarthy’s subcommittee.
McClellan was an arch-conservative and at first didn’t oppose McCarthy, but he
grew to despise the Wisconsin Republican’s tactics. And so, with Potter’s
guidance, McClellan invited a small group of reporters to his Fairfax Hotel
apartment in Washington and leaked the chronology to them. I was one of those
invited. Others included reporters for AP, UP, the New York Times and the
Washington Post....

There was only one copy of the chronology
available at McClellan’s suite, so the four other reporters and I laboriously
hand-copied each of the 34 single-spaced pages of the document, passing each
page to the other reporter until all were finished copying. We didn’t finish
until close to midnight. From the hotel, I phoned a “bulletin” and brief story
to the INS news desk in Washington, to catch the wire at the end of what we
called the “A.M. cycle” for morning papers.

...

At the time, and for years afterward, I thought
Adams had prepared and leaked his chronology on his own, in retribution for his
and his Army colleagues’ treatment by McCarthy and Cohn. Thirty years later, the full story came out in
Ewald’s deceptively titled “Who Killed Joe McCarthy” book. Ewald provided
chapter and verse on how Adams was only one player in a broadly mounted but
confidential assault on McCarthy and Cohn by the Eisenhower White House,
Department of Defense, and Department of the Army. The President himself was
described as publicly silent but vitally active in orchestrating the
developments that spawned the Army- McCarthy hearings.

Yes.Faithful steno work and an inability to see the big picture and the guy
behind the curtain—Eisenhower.That’s
how the press helped bring down Tailgunner Joe.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if
that’s how Donald Trump meets his political end, perhaps for some legal or tax
entanglement.That is, if there’s
anybody in the political establishment adept as Eisenhower who wants to remove
a disruptive, independent-minded demagogue.If there is, I don’t doubt that the journalists will be ready to hold up
their end.

7 comments:

Trump is not going to go quietly into the night like McCarthy - it'll require a full blown impeachment.BTW, who decides U.S. foreign policy? If it's the president then once he is sworn in, Trump decides what it is and anyone who acts differently is most likely committing a crime. As for Flynn, if Trump decides to have good relations with Russia, what Flynn might or might not have done becomes irrelevant.

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